We, the undersigned, representing a section of the poetry community, pledge our support to the Labour Party in the upcoming general election because we want to see its radically transformative and compassionate manifesto come into effect. The manifesto shows a commitment to social justice and equality not only in its comprehensive policies of state support for consumers and producers of the arts and culture generally, but also in its social and economic policies to support working people, including:

An end to austerity and the ideological attack on our welfare stateAn end to the malicious work capability assessments of the sick and disabled and PIPAn end to the political scapegoating of the unemployedAn end to the two child benefit capAn end to discriminatory rhetoric at the dispatch boxAn end to the "hostile environment" for immigrants and refugeesAn end to rough sleepingAn end to zero-hour contractsAn end to unpaid internshipsAn end to tuition feesAn end to creeping privatisation of the NHS

We want to see these Labour policies implemented:

A National Education ServiceA National Care ServiceA Universal Basic Income PilotA reintroduction of private rent controls and greater rights for rentersA restitution of Legal AidFree prescriptions in line with Scotland and WalesA green industrial revolutionA culturally transformative Charter for the ArtsA Race and Faith manifesto

A nonagenarian white-gloved QueenGrimaces assent to her sixth cousin twice Removed, now prime minister number fifteenOf her longest reign resigned (but noSigns of resigning) and only the secondTo whom she's related: a recently seenTrend entrenching, another silver-spoonedSprout of nepotism in our erminedDemocracy undermined, splicedTogether in unlikely embrace,A pattern's setting in: Eton-Oxford-Westminster -Unspoken hereditary principle whispersIn our wood-panelled parliamentary politics -The Remembrancer marks the shaking mace;Of course, we're reminded Her MajestyIs constitutionally bound to take advice,For her royal prerogative is purely symbolic;But who'd have thought in the bicentennialYear of Peterloo's protest for suffrage,Parliamentarians would crowd aroundThe Speaker's Chair in protest againstThe clamping of their representative voicesBy a government gone rogue to prorogueOn the flimsiest of pretexts, shutThe portcullis at a point when it's mostRequired to speak, be outspoken as spikes(MPs are more than just delegates);Just as in 1629 King CharlesThe First claimed divine right, and, in turn,Gleaned regicide... (or is this all a strangePhantasmagoria projected byNostalgic Jacob Rees-Mogg languishingAlong green benches, upper-class pussOf the Commons in human form, handsClasped across the broad lapels of his1940s-style bespoke suit jacket,His pudding-crop propped up on the carvedWooden edge, feigning forty winksOf contempt for the House of which he isLeader and Dreamhead...?)... Now anotherEntitled Etonian, an oratorical NeroBloated on hubris, braggadocio,Rodomontade (vocabulary Bercow),Has his premiership imposed upon us by90,000 blue-rinsed Tory members,Little Englanders, Daily Mail and Express-Thumping xenophobes, a prime minister-Cum-tin pot despot specially licensedTo clamp our democracy, have it silenced,Because sovereignty is not somethingTo take lightly, it's a double-edged thing...

The appeal was refused by the tribunal, the tribunal numbered Three: an insouciant judge, a glacial lawyer, and a GP Who wilfully misinterpreted him, pinned him at cross-purposes, Kept making a point of his insight and articulacy -Qualities going against his case, as if to imply the mentally Afflicted must be stupid, when it's almost always the opposite case, Her assumption that intelligence bestows prolific phrenic Equipment to cope with any symptom of mind, even The ego-dystonic, a term he'd picked up from some foxed Blue-spined Pelican (pain makes its own experts), attempting To explain the impetus of Pure Obsessional Disorder: That it matters not one whit whether he would act on his Intrusive thoughts, present risk, this bore no relevance To the intensity of distress, the inexorable anxiety Rooted in uncertainty, ever-mutating symptomatology, A mind besieged by obsessions*; something about him caused Them umbrage, the three 'impartial' panel members, apparently 'Independent' from Independent Assessment Services (Atos formerly), and the DWP; pernickety Harpies Handpicked for nitpicking pedantry, pecking at the scraps of his Incapacity - he, hapless Phineus, half-crippled by phobias; Supposed experts deciding his entitlement, or not, To Personal Independence Payment (PIP (excuse the parentheses)); They even used his avoidance behaviours to argue that he was High-functioning in spite of therapists' emphases that these Repetitious rituals are symptoms not coping mechanisms That retard healing of psychical scars; he might have quoted Kierkegaard, something along the lines that all the torments Of the damned pale in comparison to anxiety: excoriating Guilt of the innocent, gut-aching angst** in the absence of an act (Hamletic hesitation), spent nerves of no event, but that Would have also gone against him - as it did that he went To university, and, more intrusively, that creative writing Was his 'hobby' (how suburban that sounded!) which makes him Probably a bit bohemian, thus unreliable, rebellious, anti-Establishment, and while he might convince as an idiot savant, He'd obviously been embroidering the truth to a more threadbare brocade When claiming he was number-blind, they pointed out he'd Have had to tackle statistics while studying Sociology -Not as far as he could recall, but in any case he'd later changed To Ancient History... At school it took until he was fourteen To see what the clock face had so long been trying to tell him, A lightning-struck Damascene of horology! Now Old Chronos Could no longer cock a snook - a little death erupted in him then, A peripheral epiphany, still trapped in fight or flight of tick -Tock neuroticism permanently ruminating on past and future, Never mentally in the present, temporally absent, but at last Able to tell the time without having to guess, now everything Pressed more urgently, reassurance at least in grasping That suffering was time-limited as contribution-based benefits.

* This is a tautology: the Latin root obsessus means besieged.** From the Latin: angere: to choke.

If you can keep your head when all about youAre spy cameras, a deliberate delayOf the appointment time in an attemptTo break your spirit, a protracted waitIn a claustrophobic, clinical-looking room,A neutrally decorated purgatorySilent except for the rumbling water cooler,Being observed by unseen decidersProlonging your agony in a pot-plant garden...

If you can keep your head during a gruellingInterrogation at Independent AssessmentServices (formerly Atos Solutions),Being asked trick questions, being observed,Recorded, monitored, not being listened to,Only heard, not being respected orEmpathised with, but being judgedIn an unacknowledged kangaroo courtOf icy stares and sporadic mouse-clicksFor each of the ticks in the boxes onThe assessor's screen turned away from youSo you can't see – while being observedJust as a troubled adolescent byA cryptic psychiatrist's invisible observersBehind two-way glass; these desk-perchedHarpies who prey on the sick and disabledFor sport, will pick off your weak pointsAnd press all your buttons to get the mostPool-muddying responses to cloud your claim...

If you can keep your PIP when all about youAre losing theirs, it'll only be a pyrrhicVictory, a temporary reprieve, just putting offThe inevitable sting of a future trap-sprungReassessment, opportunity for symptom-Tampering and a spot of goalpost-changingTo ensure next time you're lower scoring...

If you can keep your nerve at AtosAssessment Services nestled deepIn the grey, mauve and periwinkle plushOf Kipling Buildings poorly disguisedAs a clinic but whose commercial shapeAnd façade indicate that a bank once operatedThere, on the corner of a nondescript streetIn an unexplored part of Portsmouth,Then you will be damned, my son,Damned with a disability, but worse,An invisible one, and the points you'll scoreWill be in binary numbers – the priceFor their bounties, their thirty pieces...

This poem was one of the winning entries in the 2018 Bread and Roses Poetry Award, sponsored by Unite.

In spite of recent refurbishments – fireproofed? –Grenfell Tower was engulfed in flames the full lengthOf its eyesore height ringed by brown-brick mansion blocks(Much better Thirties relics of curvaceous art deco);Now Grenfell Tower is a blackened jagged toothOn the smoking skyline – but still, by night, a whole day afterThe main blaze, orange flames flickered from insideLike the glows from pumpkin lamps lit up at Halloween parties –And those broken charred windows now glareLike the zigzagged grimaces of pumpkins' carved mouths,Once the candles have been snuffed out in their hollowed pulps.

This gutted, lugubrious building burnished black is nowNothing more than a charnel house, those still missingAmong its tenants now presumed consumed in smoke,Burnt out of their tenancies, cremated in their flats, noSpontaneous combustion of a faulty fridge aloneCould have caused such rapid conflagration – no, thoseRefurbishments last year had not been properly fireproofed,In fact, were done more for external aestheticsThan for the benefit of the residents' wellbeing or safety,Simply to prettify the outside of the towerblockTo blend better in with its salubrious surroundingsOf the rich part of Kensington – well now the towerHas been prettified by fire, Kensington's well-rinsedCan survey, instead, a fuming burnt offering, a blackSmouldering monument in Brutalist anthracite,A colossal sooty cactus scorched in the hottest JuneSince '76 (when millions of ladybirds coated Brighton beach).

Landlords, maintenance agents, Tory councillors and ToryMPs had unknowingly conspired to lay in placeThe components for a catastrophe predicted by the Tenants’Association, their complaints and warnings ignored byThe men in grey suits at Westminster, and at KensingtonAnd Chelsea Council – why would any authority listen to the concernsOf social housing tenants with no stakes in anything,Not even the right to justice, courtesy of legal aid cuts,600 impoverished people cooped up in high-piled compartments,Many trapped on benefits through no faults of their own,Or caught in the Russian roulette of zero-hours contracts,Reliant on food banks, many Arabs, Muslims, immigrants,Asylum-seekers and refugees among their numbers,Those whose lives are deemed verboten by tabloids,Now their homes more than metaphorically put to the ToryTorch – hindsight haunts Kensington: outside sprinklersCould have been retrofitted, should have been, in fact.

Now after the flames, the blame games: whose grossNegligence lit this tinder box, what cultural drift of anti-Immigrant rhetoric ignited the match? The flammablePadding in the new zinc cladding apparently helped the flamesCatch! The yellow helmets say they've never seen anythingLike this before... The tower protrudes as a combustibleSymbol of the vulnerability of the disadvantaged,Never have so many people perished for a metaphor,The surviving tenants are spitting tar, now homeless,Will they be given permanent shelter? Some survivorsVoice fears that Kensington and Chelsea CouncilWill take advantage of the tragedy to decant the tenantsElsewhere and refurbish the tower block (and properlyFireproof it this time, presumably) to house better-heeledPrivate tenants – Grenfell gentrified by fire? The arms-Length maintenance organisation might have a handIn this, more profits for future, while tight-lipped ministersOf an arms-length Government avoid the gazesOf camera lenses, mute in suits; and a spinelessPrime Minister is photographed skulking awkwardly in blackAmong the uniforms, looking like the rich distantRelative at the funeral keeping apart from her mourningPoor relations; while Jeremy Corbyn responds more promptly,Goes among the families of the missing, comforting them,Hugging those who are denied even the vent of grievingFor not yet knowing if their bereavement is temporaryOr permanent, surviving relatives who catch on the grapevineOf drip-fed information that the bodies still insideMight be so badly burnt they'll not be able to be identified –Forced out by fire, is this how Grenfell's gentrified?

Alan Morrison introduces his latest poetry collection, and calls for submissions for his latest anthology of political poetry.

After seven years of what might be termed the ‘welfare hate’, with over 80,000 deaths (and suicides) among sick and disabled claimants between 2011-14, approximately 2,380 within six weeks of the DWP and Atos declaring them “fit for work”, it is only in recent months that the British pathology of what I term ‘Scroungerology’ has shown vague signs of a pausing for thought.

Undoubtedly some factors contributing to this latter cultural hiatus are the United Nations report condemning the Coalition and Tory Governments’ abuses of disability rights through disability-targeted benefit cuts, and veteran social-realist director Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or and BAFTA-winning film intervention, I, Daniel Blake (in some ways a polemical update on Jim Allen and Roland Joffé’s superlative The Spongers, broadcast 1978, which juxtaposes the story of a single mother and her children targeted by punitive disability benefit cuts against the backdrop of the taxpayer-funded Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and which is more than ripe for repeat).

These have come as timely reinforcements to several veteran campaigns –Disabled People Against the Cuts, the Spartacus Report, the Black Triangle Campaign, Calum’s List et al – that have fought valiantly over the past seven years to put the catastrophic impact of the disability cuts in the public domain, in spite of the DWP and a complicit mainstream media’s best efforts to ‘bury’ such issues.

Nevertheless, we have a long way to go politically and attitudinally as a society until we can wrestle back some semblance of a compassionate and tolerant welfare state which looks after the poor, unemployed, disabled and mentally afflicted, and without recourse to stigmatisation and persecution. The front line of ‘scroungermongering’ is the thick red line of the right-wing red tops, most heinously the Daily Express, and, of course, every English person’s favourite hate rag, the Daily Mail – the ubiquitous negative drivers of most public opinion.

To be on benefits today, no matter what one’s personal circumstances or disadvantages, is almost a taboo, and one exploited ruthlessly by the makers of such televisual effluence as Benefits Street, Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole, and the reprehensibly titled Saints and Scroungers (one campaigner, Sue Marsh, has tried to re-appropriate that dreadful term on her admirably defiant Diary of a Benefit Scrounger blog).

In spite of a faint sense of relief felt across the unemployed and incapacitated communities at new Work and Pensions Secretary Damien Green’s announcement that there will be no more welfare cuts beyond those already legislated, there is still cause for trepidation when said legislated cuts of £30 per week to new Employment and Support Allowance claims kick in this April – certainly, then, ‘the cruellest month’ this year.

By something of a coincidence, my next poetry collection, precisely on the theme of the welfare and disability cuts and the stigmatisation of the unemployed, Tan Raptures, is published by Smokestack Books on 1 April.

Tan Raptures gathers together poems composed during the past six years of remorseless benefits cuts and welfare stigmatisation. Some of it is from an empirical perspective, my having been for much of this period in the ‘Work-Related Activity Group’ (or ‘WRAG’ as it’s disparagingly abbreviated) of Employment and Support Allowance, where those who are deemed unfit for work for the time being but not necessarily permanently are placed (I am a lifelong sufferer of pure obsessional disorder, an unpredictable and debilitating form of OCD). This has been punctuated by sporadic paid opportunities (termed ‘permitted work’ or ‘therapeutic earnings’ by the DWP) in poetry mentoring, tutoring and commissions.

Poetry and unemployment often go hand-in-hand, if that’s not a contradiction in terms, since writing poetry is a form of occupation (alongside editing it, publishing it, teaching it, mentoring it, workshopping it etc.), even if an often impecunious one as paid opportunities are few and far between. Indeed, the fact that poetry has very little ‘market value’, and employment or occupation in capitalist society is almost entirely defined in terms of earning money, almost all full-time poets are, paradoxically, ‘unemployed’; at least, in purely superficial material terms. Through the sadly seldom-consulted prism of humanistic occupational theory, poetry is certainly an ‘occupation’ in the authentic sense of the term.

Many poets have been unemployed at points in their careers albeit ‘poetically employed’ at the same time. Indeed, unemployment is often an ‘occupational hazard’ of being a poet, and many either still are, or certainly have been in the past, intermittent benefit claimants. Capitalism has no time for poets since it deems them unprofitable and economically unproductive (in any case, it has their occupational replacements: advertising copywriters).

This is in stark contrast to the stipends paid by the state in the old Soviet Union specifically to keep poets in their poetry (a similar scheme would be most welcome here today). The sometimes inescapable relationship between poetry and unemployment – bards on the dole – is almost never spoken let alone written about by poets. Poetry and unemployment are unspoken companions. But many poets will stifle a bitter laugh at the notion of a Department for Waifs and Poets (DWP).

In Tan Raptures I refer to the DWP as the ‘Department for War on the Poor’, since that is undoubtedly its primary purpose today. The collection includes polemical paeans to many victims of the Tory benefits cuts and sanctions, such as Glaswegian playwright Paul Reekie (suicide), ex-soldier David Clapson (death from diabetic complications/malnutrition), and the Coventry soup-kitchen-dependent couple, the Mullins (suicide).

The eponymous polemical poem is an Audenic dialectic in 14 cantos on the social catastrophe of the benefits caps, pernicious red-top “scrounger” propaganda, and Iain Duncan Smith’s despotic six year grip at the DWP. It is also a verse-intervention of Social Catholicism, as epitomised by Pope Francis, in oppositional response to the “appalling policies” (Jeremy Corbyn) of self-proclaimed ‘Roman Catholic’ Duncan Smith.

The title Tan Raptures plays on the biblical notion of ‘The Rapture’ – the ‘raising up’ of living and dead believers to meet their maker in the sky – satirising the ubiquitous ‘tan envelopes’ that strike fear into claimants on a daily basis as passports to a twisted Tory notion of ‘moral salvation’ through benefit sanction.

So common has this phenomenon become that the phrase ‘fear of the brown envelope’ now denotes a recognised phobic condition, and was even used as the first part of a title for an academic paper on exploring welfare reform with long-term sickness benefits recipients’ (Garthwaite, K., 2014).

It is my hope that Tan Raptures will play its part in keeping up the momentum of the belatedly emerging counter-cultural welfare narrative as championed by the likes of Ken Loach, and, of course, Labour’s first socialist leader in decades, Jeremy Corbyn, who put it firmly on record that he opposes any open discrimination against the poor, unemployed, sick and disabled in such reprehensible and hateful terms as “scrounger”, “skiver” and “shirker”.

Our culture of ‘Scroungerology’ has been something I have been writing polemic on for a number of years now at The Recusant and through the two anti-austerity anthologies under its e-imprint Caparison: Emergency Verse – Poets in Defence of the Welfare State (2010/11) and The Robin Hood Book – Verse Versus Austerity (2012/13).

It also seems an apt time then to pitch Caparison’s belated third poetry anthology, The Brown Envelope Book, or The Brown E-Book for short, since it will be, at least initially, an electronic publication, as was, originally, Emergency Verse.

The main theme of this third anthology is, as the title suggests, benefits cuts and welfare stigmatisation, but it will also be addressing the housing crisis by petitioning for the reintroduction of private rent controls and also raising greater awareness of the prevalence of letting agent-and-landlord negative vetting of prospective tenants on the basis that they claim benefits or Local House Allowance (even if they’re in work!).

Poets of all stripes are invited to submit their poems on the themes of unemployment and welfare; the empathic but, more especially, the empirical, welcome.

Alan Morrison’s Tan Raptures is published by Smokestack Books. It is available now to order at: https://www.waterstones.com/book/tan-raptures/alan-morrison/9780995563506. To submit work for consideration in The Brown E-Book, please email up to six poems along with a brief biog in the body of the email to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Please put ‘Brown E-Book’ in the subject header.

Sixth Rapture: Shut Curtains during the Day

Unlike riches, policies do have a trickledown effect,And the dictates of Damascus Smith –hairshirt Thomas MalthusOf Caxton House/or Gregor Mendel of the DWP–Would germinate into a pearl-white species of croppedCorrespondences in Kafkaesque script bespeaking strange augurs,Barbed inferences, grim omens, pointed portents –vatic tansVibrating with cryptic stings: ‘A query has arisen regardingYour claim…’, or, ‘We are letting you know what might happen to you’,But without actually doing so, only adumbrating throughDeliberate ambiguity and mystique of omission (the oldHemingway tip-of-the-iceberg effect), lacings of uncertainty,Leaving the door wedged open to auto-suggestion, taxingAnxious imaginations prone to catastrophic projections –The implicatures captured uniquely in tan paper raptures;While elliptic and ecliptic occupational purposes, strangeOcculting ranks and titles, Customer Compliance Officers,Brought thoughts of Thought Police or plain-clothedGestapo in tan macs with glacial stares behind impenetrableSpectacles turning up on doorsteps clutching rolled umbrellasAnd black leather briefcases stuffed full with thumbscrews,Coat-hangers, piano wires, tape-recorders and lie-detectors –While Government encouragement of neighbourly petit-Espionage on unemployed suspects (more the ‘Big BrotherSociety’) upped the tan ante for vigilante attitudesAnd raised the temperature spiking the thunderous atmosphereTo puncture-point as Ministers instructed conscientiousCitizens to take note of those windows with “shut curtainsDuring the day” –or, in Baronet Osborne’s vocabulary:“Closed shutters”– as they left for work each morning: dawnPatrols of resentful workers directed to mark front doorsOf suspected Dole-Judes, like so many beady-eyed jackdaws –It’s a peculiarly English kind of malice that criminalisesInnocents and victimises victims of circumstances thrustOn them by others’ “tough choices” and “difficult decisions”…How appropriate that the Department for War on the PoorShould send out such vindictive missives in envelopesOf various browns, parcelling captured sunlightTo disinfect the disaffected, frightened, forgotten, pilloried,Persecuted, tarred-and-feathered benefit spendthriftsAnd profligates, scapegoats and targets for the ran-tan tanningOf stigmatising tans –what strange types of benefits that grantNo benefits, neither to wallet nor wellbeing, but onlyDeplete peace of mind and suppress appetites of “useless eaters”,“Asocial” and “arbeitsscheu”–is that part of the point, to softenThe blow of swallowed-up cash-flow by shrinking stomachsSo there’s less need for food but more room for souls to growLike tapeworms of purely spiritual appetites distendingThemselves on the carroty acid reflux of phantomMastication, swishing round in rapturous backwashes fromHalf-digested papers…? Some recipients experienceEpiphanies: eat the tan envelopes, as if they were unleavenedVictuals, bellies booming out with brown Holy Ghosts…

Alan Morrison reviews one of the new Culture Matters poetry pamphlets.

This new series of poetry pamphlets under the Culture Matters imprint of Manifesto Press are glossily produced and complemented by specially commissioned illustrations throughout, all of which is to emphasize CM’s mission to spread progressive and accessible literature to a wide class-crossing readership (funding from the Unite union puts a stamp to that). This is a bold and brave cultural mission, especially in such reactionary times, not unlike that of Pelican back in the 1930s.

The superbly eclectic and engaging CM website (one can almost imagine the ghost of Christopher Caudwell personally endorsing it) has already proven an enormous success attracting a significant readership but above all a broad and hugely varied contributor base.

Slave Songs and Symphonies by Glaswegian poet David Betteridge is a consummate and immediately engaging introduction to this new series of poetry pamphlets, a passionate, intelligent but still highly accessible collection of poems that serves as an accomplished primer of contemporary political poetry. Akin to the very Blakean ethos of Culture Matters, the emphasis here is very much on poems as ‘songs’ and Betteridge’s verse has some key aspects in common with the Blake of Songs of Innocence and Experience, and not simply in its associative title. Like Blake, Betteridge composes cadent polemical poems that are ostensibly accessible while offering figurative depth for those readers looking beneath the surface narratives, allusions and dialectics.

The first poem in the chapbook, ‘So Long’, opens with a quote from Italian Marxist writer and political thinker, Antonio Gramsci, a statement of allegiance starting: ‘I am a partisan, I am alive’. This dialectical narrative poem charts the development of historical human consciousness and to its close launches into a kind of Hegelian thesis asserting – in italics – a profound Marxian conception of ‘the Fall’ as humanity’s lapse into feudalism and capitalism:

namely the class divide that brought such woeinto the world, out of a Bronze Age melting pot.

Elites took power to own and rule,against the interests of the rest,whose role it was to labour, die, and rot.the class divide: it is our Original(and continuing) Sin, to be redeemed, if ever,only in a Commonweal.

‘In Brecht’s Bar’ starts with a brilliant quote from the eponymous groundbreaking German dramaturge: ‘Who built the seven gates of Thebes?/ The books are filled with the names of kings./ Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?’ This is a short dialogue poem, a verse vignette set in a pub in which one punter speaks to another about the absence of written working-class history:

‘I overheard you talking.Seems History’s your thing: mine, too,though all the dates and namesthat interest meare never put in any books at all.’

‘Fighting Back’ is in similar vein, a charming vignette of an elderly veteran protestor who salutes goodbye to a fellow traveller with a ‘thumbs-up, then clenched fist’ –Betteridge is an often very witty poet. ‘Giving Back Riches’ is juxtaposed with a striking photographic collage picture by collaborative artist Bob Starrett featuring the impressive black actor, singer, Communist, political activist and icon of the Harlem Renaissance, Paul Robeson. Betteridge pays emotive tribute to Robeson:

Carrying a deep wound, his and the world’s,dreaming a generous dream,following the rainbow and the dove,he was a giant, serving the people.

He personifies him as many mighty rivers, and other geographical features:

He was Clyde and Volga,Mississippi, Ganges, Amazon and Nile.He was Vesuvius.

Robeson was truly a force of nature in many respects, artistically and politically, and an especially courageous man considering the more racially prejudiced times he lived and worked in. As an outspoken Communist, he was also included on the McCarthy blacklist. Betteridge’s eulogy rings directly: 'His echo lingers, loud/ for those with souls to hear'.

The longest poem in the pamphlet is ‘Showing a Way’ and depicts the Upper Clyde Shipyard Work-in of 1971-2, previously commemorated in the excellent Betteridge-edited A Rose Loupt Oot (Smokestack Books, 2012), and reviewed on The Recusant. The poem begins fittingly with an aphorism from Work-in leader Jimmy Reid: ‘We are witnessing an eruption not of lava but of labour’. The Vesuvius of the previous poem and the lava quoted at the top of the following one gives a volcanic quality to the imageries of this selection.

‘Showing a Way’ begins with a passionate assertion that is all the more striking because of its simplicity of expression:

Once upon a time – here,in the real world, for this is not a fairy tale –a bold idea changed If to That.Imagine, acted on by many,took on the force of hard material fact.

There’s a consciously naïve quality which arguably makes its point more succinctly and potently than anything more poetically oblique could:

This happened many years ago:the place, the shipyards of the Upper Clyde.The wonder is, given the world’s wounds since,the bold idea has not yet died.

This ‘bold idea’ we might conclude is Socialism or Communism. Betteridge’s most sublime poetic moments stand out strikingly amidst his more accessible and direct phrasing and diction – again we have something of a threading leitmotif in the image of ‘rivers’:

All rivers have their storied past,in part the same, in part unique.more than a few have known the prideof ships well made and safely launched;and also known, when fortunes ebb,a shadow-side; but here, at UCS,a Labour victory was ours,and Capital, out-classed, endured reversal,and a loosening of its powers.

From the leitmotif of ‘rivers’ to the volcanic leitmotif, reiterating Jimmy Reid’s quote from the top of the poem:

Big on any scale, a volcano, not of lavabut of Labour, burst into flame.The action that eight thousand workers tookfilled the bright skies of politics.

Betteridge venerates the UCS Work-in as a significant victory in the history of class struggle, something groundbreaking even for the more politically restive and radicalised Seventies:

Briefly, social order’s deep assumptions shook.That is the core of Clyde’s especial claim.

The forces of Capital marked out the shipyard as a ‘Lame duck’ of declining industry. ‘Never mind the lives invested there,/ the teeming skill, the order book!’ Betteridge rightly protests. Then, more defiantly: ‘Dead duck was what it wished to see,/ little knowing that our bird would fly’. There’s then a note of triumph in the following pithily expressed, part-rhyming stanza:

Unite and fight!In tandem, and in full,heeding the maxim’s dual elements,not from the dole outwith the shipyards’ gates,but working from within:there lay the workers’ stratagem,that helped us win.

[The term ‘outwith’ is Scottish and means ‘outside; beyond’]. For this was the unique strategy of this particular strike, a strike which, ingeniously, involved not a downing of tools and a walking off the premises but oppositely a continuation of production as part of a Work-in, or labour lock-in if you like. Like the striking miners of the mid-Eighties, the UCS working strikers were sustained by donations of money, provisions and, just as importantly, messages of moral support, to help keep their bodies and minds together:

This shipyards’ mail bag,like a farmer’s sack of seed,spilled out its daily bulge of contents:news received of rallies, demonstrations, strikes;well-wishers’ words, and sometimes flowers;and cash, from corner shops,from churches, children, unions,and the whole wide listening world,sums both large and widows’ generous mites,sent in comradeship, to keepthe struggle’s fire alight.

But next Betteridge turns his attention to the state of play today:

The yards were saved: the bold idea,in act, had proved its worth.But now, several decades on, what’s left?In place of gain, a creeping dearth.

It is indeed a bleak prospect:

Not only ships have sunk, or gone for scrap,but yards as well, and jobs, and skills,and with them, hope.

Capitalism has long laid waste to much of British society, not just industry but communities, solidarity, the hope of socialism. The Thatcherite Tories put paid to such aspirations of fellowship, community and equality, having learnt many strategic lessons from such rare proletarian triumphs as the UCS Work-in (e.g. such as when the Thatcher Government stocked up on coal prior to bringing in its toxic policy to shut down most of the country’s coal mines, having anticipated the immediate effects of miners striking). Thus Betteridge laments:

For Capital, the battle that it lostwas clarion-call and school;it learned far more than we.It learned to hone its tools of shock,displace, lay off, and rule.

Betteridge continues pessimistically using brutalised language to express the brutalisation of the industrial proletariat:

Ganging up and doing down,it made too many of us settle, first for slicesof the loaf we made, then beggars’ crusts,then bugger all; ruthlessly,it grabbed again its habitual crown.

Betteridge perfectly expresses the despair of the Left at the atomisation of the working classes, the chronic decline in social solidarity, and their political alienation from globalisation, all of which has made ripe pickings for the duplicitous populism of Ukip and the embroilment of Brexit:

For us, a tragedy ensued,its playing-out still under way;comrades at loggerheads and each others’ throats;lost sense of purpose and common cause,parties pulled apart, offering least, not best, resistancein a losing war.

Betteridge then reflects on the UCS Work-in: ‘how might we have built on it/ and built afresh; how might we, even now,/ still launch upon our carrying stream of deepest need’. So to a defiant historical materialist rallying-cry, a concrete crescendo of class determination in the face of only apparently triumphant capitalism – bolstered by ecological and geological imagery, tectonics, volcanic etc.:

This world shifts restlessly;a rising flood of tremors agitates beneath;fresh rifts in what we thought was solid massappear.

Present struggle cries to knowthe complex story of its past.Take it, save it from erasure,or revision’s grasp!

What happened here in ’71 and ‘2can be no Terra Nullius of the mind, openfor errors to invade: it’s where,ablaze and wise, we entered history,and showed a way whereby a futuremight be made.

Perhaps my favourite poem in this chapbook is ‘A Fish Rising’, which employs a beautiful metaphor of the carp for the seemingly slow even glacial emergence of socialism from the muddy depths of the capitalist pond, of socialism’s dormancy, that even at times when it seems to be absent, it is still with us albeit invisibly beneath the surface of vicissitudes, and that it can take a long time for it to slowly float up and break through that historical surface. But socialism is always there as long as there is oppression; it is the ineffaceable shadow of just outrage cast by the planted colossus of capitalism – its anathema and ultimate nemesis.

Betteridge begins with a profound quote from revolutionary figure Rosa Luxemburg: ‘The revolution will raise itself up again…/ it will proclaim: I was, I am, I shall be…’. ‘A Fish Rising’ is perhaps an example of what William Empson defined as ‘covert pastoral’ in his book Some Versions of Pastoral (1935): that is to say poetry which appears on the surface as pastoral or bucolic in terms of imagery but which is actually polemical, even politically subversive, in its underlying messages. Betteridge presents us with natural imagery and metaphor to evoke the sometimes dormant but ever-restless spirit of socialism:

From the bottom of an ancient pool,said to be bottomless,up to the film of its meeting with the still air,hungry, in search of fly or grub,a fat carp rises.

The use of natural imagery here is reminiscent of Seamus Heaney and, at times, the darker twists of Ted Hughes – the following is a beautifully wrought trope:

With a barbed kiss,it breaks the surface and the silenceof this summer’s day, and eats;then, glidingly, it nosesback to the cool of its brown deep,a world away.

The striking phrase ‘brown deep’ is distinctly Hughesian; the enjambment after ‘deep’, partitioning off the trope ‘A world away’, is particularly powerful in expressing the sharp separation between idealism and reality. Betteridge then casts an eye back through history as he contemplates this deep ancient pond:

Romans in their heyday were the firstto stock this pool; thereafter, monkshymning their deadand risen god, tended the fish,until in turntheir fortunes, like the Romans’,fell.

There then ensues a beautifully phrased, profound trope which is at once rueful as it is hopeful:

Now, at another epoch’s ruined end,the world in flames,I pace the foot-worn path around the pool;heavy with thought,I count the failed resurgencesthat history has seen, brief floweringsof the people’s will.they grew wild, their early promiseof a new-style beauty, unremembered now,or else despised.

The phrase ‘brief flowerings/ of the people’s will’ is particularly emotive of the struggle of socialism and its' only periodic surfacing. Betteridge again defiantly appropriates lost battles in the cause of socialism as instructive vicissitudes: ‘succeeding Calvaries along the way may serve/ as school and seed of future victory’. The poem’s momentum becomes almost visionary:

Eurydice sang, a women’s choir.I had heard them at a May Day years before.Now, at the fish-pool’s side, in my mind’s replay,they sang again, ballads in praiseof two dead giants of our foundering cause.

Betteridge then depicts two past figureheads of the historic Left, Scots Bolshevik and founder of the Scottish Workers Republican Party, who died at just 44 after his health had been destroyed through forced feeding while imprisoned, John Maclean, here a spectre ‘pale-faced, hoarse-voiced’, and the aforementioned Rosa Luxemburg, a socialist martyr, who died at the hands of German soldiers in the aftermath of the failed Spartacist uprising of 1919 – she’s invoked by Betteridge thus:

The other: passionate, an optimist,convinced that everyone can contribute a mite,or more, to all our hope’s refashioning,until a soldier’s rifle butt abruptly put a stopto all her eloquence, cracking her proud headlike a coconut.

Betteridge brings this brilliant poem to its defiant end in an almost incantatory tone which stirs the spirit:

I see a movement in the pool,a glimpse of mottle, a sun-reflecting curve,a twist of tail and fin.

One speck of dirt, or gold,can tip the heaviest-laden balancefrom the straight.

(Taking hope, I count some auguriesof hope.)

One fact, discrepant with the dogmaof the orthodox, can breach its errors’ edifice,admitting light.

One wound, one cry, one song,one name can travel faster than a Caesar’s hate.

We are – or might become –a force more powerful than earthquakes,cyclones, lava-flows, or a river’s wearing-downof mountains to peneplain.

Slowly rising, the carp begins once moreto stir, to swim.

It’s interesting to see again the leitmotifs of ‘lava’ and ‘rivers’. The restraint of the final trope abruptly arrests the onward rush of the verses leading up to it but tantalises by ending on infinitives, which indicate continuation, action: in this case, socialism is in the process of resurfacing again as a causal force.

‘Pulling the Plug’ is a poem-polemic expressing opposition to the reprehensible and remorseless welfare reforms of the past six years although this is not explicit in the poem itself (the Notes at the back of the pamphlet elucidate this). Betteridge captures well the sense of outrage and moral disgust at the apparent insouciance of ministers who have seemingly with impunity salami-sliced hundreds of thousands of the unemployed, sick and disabled out of existence. Betteridge’s invective pulls no punches in its directness:

The killer nods, pretends to listen,curves his mouth in a lean grin.I see a shark, in his element,sure of his next and every win.The killer manages a judicious tear.(‘I empathise; I go to church; I care…’)I see an obvious reptile here.The killer laughs.I see an ape, exulting in his dominance.

Betteridge’s explains in the Note to this poem that this is a ‘composite’ of various ministers, but it’s almost impossible to read this particular stanza without picturing the chief culprit of the benefit cuts and so-called ‘welfare reforms’, the egregious and pathologically arrogant Iain Duncan Smith who is certainly reptilian in manner and is a self-proclaimed Roman Catholic and church-goer.

No doubt IDS is a particular figure of hate in Betteridge’s native Glasgow, since, it was in the deprived Easterhouse – which is, I believe, part of the larger impoverished area of the Gorbals – that the future Work and Pensions Secretary apparently had his ‘Damascene moment’ on first witnessing abject poverty there. IDS apparently shed a tear on that occasion, and also later shed ‘a judicious tear’ when being interviewed by Ian Hislop in a documentary about the history of British welfare provision when talking about a young destitute single mother he’d met.

IDS’s answer to such cases: strip state support from the third child up! Duncan Smith certainly is a reptile in the sense he cries crocodile tears. The poem’s title is a double play: it’s the incensed Glaswegian TV viewer pulling the plug of the TV set after having enough of watching Tory ministers justify the unjustifiable, while also summoning to mind the what the Government has administratively been doing to countless incapacitated and seriously ill claimants over six years.

‘The Tug of It’ remembers the countless past half-forgotten proletarian lives that once gave shape and spirit to various streets, houses, objects and tools of trade. After an aphorism on the sempiternal nature of history by the recently departed John Berger, this partly ekphrastic poem begins with a meditation on static written history, on less-remembered and under-recorded working-class lives and histories, and conjures the ghosts of these proletarian pasts:

Looking at the tools we have,thinking as we work with them,we meet the many hands before usthat have altered, useably, their makeand fit: a chain of rafts runs back,and back, and we can feel the tug of it.

On a prosodic note, the use of internal rhyme here is a deft touch, and one is almost reminded at times in Betteridge’s more metrical passages of Martin Bell, Tony Harrison and Andy Croft. Betteridge pays tribute to numberless shadowy working-class lives as he is happily haunted by class-ancestors:

Standing in a field of stooks,or wandering the streets of any town,we see at every turnthe trace and monument of many folk.

That latter phrase is particularly striking [‘stooks’ is a term for a clutch of sheaves set upright in a field to dry]. The stanza continues evocatively:

That path across the well-worked rigs –those whose feet first trod it,those who came each year to ploughand sow and harvest, and maintain the ditch,while empires grew, then died…that house or factory or school or shop –those who gave to it their given time,in living there and work…

Betteridge concludes the poem on a note of eternal remembrance: ‘They are all accessible through memory/ to us, and in memory persist’.

‘Essential Gifts’ is a glorious song for socialism primed on a simple but profound aphorism from Scottish mill worker and socialist activist, Mary Brooksbank, which invokes the socialist aspiration of a material heaven on earth: ‘This surely was what you were created for,/ to make this here a hereafter’. The poem is a part-lament for a historically maltreated Scotland:

Generations left this land.Emptied glens, and mills and minesgrassed-over now, and hard-built hopesknocked flat by the frequent wrecking ballbear witness to a long ebbof clearance, exile, and decline.

Driven by hunger and the loaded gun,seeing no future here worth dying for,wave upon living waves, our forebears travelledfar, no continent unmarked by the illor good of their setting there;but this plot of earth to which we cling,can feast us all, and others too, who join us now,if only tended with a lover’s care.

It’s an almost hymn-like paean to proletarian Scotland but one which, in Betteridge’s signature tone, rises to a defiantly optimistic close:

There are riches heaped around,ready for our harvesting, essential giftsof sea and air and common ground.We, by hand and brain, can labour them,creating goods, enough to share.

Our class has made a start.Things change; we make them change,as we, like fortune, like the seasons,like the seas’ tides, turn; and, having turned,we see in full the great worthof our now and future land.

The collection closes on ‘Only in a Commonweal’. The poem is preceded by another aphorism of Rosa Luxemburg’s: ‘Where the chains of Capitalism are forged,/ there they must be broken…’. This poem is again a kind of proletarian hymn that reminds how it is the common citizens of capitalist societies that keep it functioning and producing and manufacturing, the same ‘proles’ or ‘plebs’ who are, of course, called up to be sacrificed for said societies in times of conflict. This is the only poem –perhaps because it is the closing one– which is centre-justified:

We are the nothings you walk past.Your lowest and least,we live in the margins of your power.Expendable, we fight your many wars.Your triumphs we pay for, but have none.

This is a fiercely defiant anthem for the unsung working - or ‘maintenance’- class of capitalist society, its operators, producers, carriers, pallbearers:

Unheeded and unnamed,we make your schemes come true.Every sweated brick and girder, every milligram and tonneof every building you command is ours.Every furrow ploughed and filled with seed is ours.Your wealth-producing factories, your cities – ours!

Day in, day out, we do your work and will.We pipe the water that you needfrom reservoir to tap; we stitch the clothesthat cover up your nakedness,we bake the bread (and cake) you eat.

Then we come to the crescendo of the closing poem and of this deeply affecting and accomplished collection as a whole with the invocation of its collective title:

We are your numerous and essential kin.Suffering most, we learn most.Our slave-songs make symphonies;our longings, creeds.

And finally, to earth with a thud in a phrase which reverberates like a spade hitting stone:

We dig your graves.

David Betteridge’s Slave Songs and Symphonies deserves and demands re-reading and the directness and accessibility of its poetic language and political message combined with the musical song-like tone of the poems themselves makes it more mnemonic in quality than most poetry collections. Glossily produced, and brilliantly illustrated by Bob Starrett, it is almost a secular hymn-book for the proletariat and in that sense is authentically Blakean and an exemplary introduction to the poetic mission of Culture Matters.

Andy Croft’s essay against the implicitly capitalist notion of poetry as ‘property’ (what we might call ‘propetry’), and Mike Sanders' article on working class Chartist poetry, open up a much-needed debate on the contention that poetry and all literature is essentially a communal phenomenon, since its prime purpose is surely to communicate as widely as possible and share ideas and experiences.

These are notions unfashionable in a capitalistic postmodernist poetry ‘mainstream’, which is often characterised by one-upmanship and individualistic careerism, though also, ironically, a striking uniformity of style. This mainstream poetry is sponsored by what are effectively ‘poetry corporations’ or ‘poetry monopolies’: the hedge-funded Poetry Book Society, the all-encompassing Poetry Society, the ‘top’ metropolitan imprints, and, most pervasively of all, the poetry prize and competition circuit.

But Croft’s communistic premise is one with which great literary thinkers such as Christopher Caudwell and W.H. Auden would have been in complete agreement, back in the Thirties, which was the most pronouncedly ‘political’ period of British poetics.

That there is a germ of commonality in literature is indisputable, and the heartening notion of what might be termed a ‘poetry of common ownership’ is not so quixotic as it might sound when one explores the too-often obscured and ignored ‘shadow lineage’ of proletarian poetics throughout British literary history. For example, the explosion of polemical poetry of the Industrial Revolution, most notably among the Chartist movement (1838–1858) whose political cause was almost inseparable from the prolific school of polemical poetics it inspired, as Michael Sanders is illustrating in his series of articles.

Poets are magpies

Words belong to all of us, and, ultimately, what is poetry, or any other form of literature, but the creative rearranging of words into particular combinations? While the nuances of these verbal rearrangements and phrasal orderings may be claimed as the expressive property of the word-arrangers, the words themselves cannot be, since they are formed from the common tongue, or lexicon, the lingua franca. And who has ever claimed proprietorship over words? Not even seminal lexicographer Samuel Johnson claimed that.

Poets are magpies: attracted to phrases like shiny objects from which they most often fashion other phrases, or variations of phrase, and, sometimes unconsciously, ‘lift’ or ‘borrow’ phrases. To ‘borrow’ in this way is not to claim something belongs to one as much as it belongs to everyone, and can be reused or imbued with new meanings in different contexts. Within reasonable degrees, this is also complimentary to the original ‘phrase maker’. Moreover, what are poets, artists, but creative baton-carriers who are inspired by former works of predecessors and then in turn reshape these influences to the expression of their own personality? And is ‘phrasal borrowing’ less taboo in titles to poems, which can in turn also shape their concepts or themes?

T.S. Eliot, one of the most distinctive and individualistic voices in poetry of any period, had this to say on the subject:

'Traces of Kipling appear in my own mature verse where no diligent scholarly sleuth has yet observed them, but which I am myself prepared to disclose. I once wrote a poem called ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’: I am convinced that it would never have been called ‘Love Song’ but for a title of Kipling's that stuck obstinately in my head: The Love Song of Har Dyal'.

Should Eliot be accused of plagiarism, of leeching off Kipling’s imagination to come up with his poem’s title? Few poets were so aware of the poetic canon and tradition, and of their temporal place in the poetic continuum, as T.S. Eliot. Indeed, his aforementioned poem, a ‘seminal’ one for Anglo-American Modernism, is laced thickly with allusions that frequently melt into full-on phrasal borrowings from previous poets and writers, from such ‘common-held’ or ‘folkloric’ sources as the plays of Shakespeare and the aphorisms of the New Testament.

For all of Eliot’s own considerable genius, he was one of the most thoroughly-sourced poets of them all. He was as much a polymath scholar in poetry as James Joyce was in poetic prose, and both of their writings, significantly, were steeped in Greco-Roman mythological allusions.

Indeed, so rich in allusions to previous works of literature, not to say actual quotations couched in the poet’s own tropes, was Eliot’s most celebrated poem, The Waste Land, that he specifically furnished it with detailed annotations ‘with a view to spiking the guns of critics of my earlier poems who had accused me of plagiarism’. As Hugh Kenner puts it in his brilliantly insightful and beautifully written, The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot, ‘Cities are built out of the ruins of previous cities, as The Waste Land is built out of the remains of older poems’.

Hence, without its sources, The Waste Land, that ‘heap of broken images’, could not have been written, at least, not in the distinctly splintered, aphoristic and fragmentary way that it was, which was an enormous part of the mystique which came to surround it and fascinate poets and scholars for generations afterwards. Is Eliot the sum of his sources? Eliot was part of a poetic pattern, and he knew his place in that pattern, and might well not have become a poet at all were it not for his keen awareness of it.

The Waste Land was Eliot’s definitive expression of this sense of literary inheritance and curatorship, and is in many ways a work of poetic archaeology dealing as it does in poetic relics and ruins, just as Ulysses, published the same year (1922), was for James Joyce. It was also Eliot, of course, who coined the contentious aphorism: ‘Good poets borrow, great poets steal’. We’ll leave the discussion of Eliot and Joyce there, minded as I am as to the irony of discussing two of the most accomplished exponents of what Cyril Connolly called the ‘Mandarin’ tradition in literature, in a proem to a series of articles on a much earthier proletarian poetic tradition.

Ploughing the common land

The literary scholar Hugh Kenner, then, gifts us a fitting metaphor for the nature of poetry, indeed, of all literature and creative human work: ‘cities built out of ruins of previous cities’.

No poetry can ever be truly original, and that’s as much to do with the fundamental homology of language as it is the inheritance of the literature sprouted from it. In this sense, then, and to use a more natural metaphor, every new poem is a transplanting in place of a past crop: the soil that nourishes all crops belongs to no one, hence to everyone; it is not up for grabs, only for refurbishment. Language is common land – the common tongue – and poetry is its most beautiful flower.

All poets are part of a pattern, inspired by their predecessors, thence continuing the creative process and thereby contributing to the ongoing reinvigoration and reorganisation of the common tongue; like ploughing the common land. It is also disputable as to whether any poets, any creative persons, are actually the architects of their own talents or simply the vessels through which transcendent creative powers are operating.

After all, inspiration is a prime component to creativity. The etymology of ‘inspired’ comes from the word ‘inspirited’ i.e. to inspirit, to put spirit into something. And the commonly used term ‘gift’ to describe a talent is too often overlooked in its implications: what else is a ‘gift’ but something given to someone? Creativity might be partly inherited, partly self-nurtured, but can never be entirely self-nurtured: one cannot create oneself, hence cannot create one’s own creativity.

Of course, it’s only polite for the ‘borrower’ to acknowledge such borrowings, but to neglect to do so is more impolite than impious. Don’t all poets begin by borrowing, even sometimes by some subtle form of plagiarising? Some of the most highly respected poets of the past began writing that way. And should a particular poetic metre be the property only of its inventor? If so, Keats’ Spenserian stanzas are metrical theft!

Nothing can get us away from the fundamental fact that language belongs to all of us. Its cogs might be oiled by wordmongers in order to rescue them from neglect, even to retune and neologise, but ultimately no one can claim copyright of the common tongue. The egoistic urge to do so is what Christopher Caudwell would have termed a ‘petit-bourgeois’ one, wrapped up with impulses to oneupmanship and self-promotion, of which all poets can be guilty at times.

But if those are the prime urges of any poets, then it’s perhaps better they don’t write poetry at all, but instead set themselves up as private landlords and deal in bricks and mortar rather than iambs and metaphors, if they are more concerned with impressing themselves and asserting property rights over peers and readers than attempting to upkeep the poetic soil and continue nourishing common consciousness.

Humility is the compost of poetry

There must be humility in the poet – without it, the poetry simply moulders into ornamental solipsism. To extend the agricultural metaphor, humility is the compost of poetry. The notion of literature as private property, or ‘intellectual property’, is not only a relatively recent thing historically-speaking, but also a distinctly bourgeois concept. Tellingly, much of the ‘common’ poetry of the 17th through to the early 19th centuries was often published anonymously or under pseudonyms, which in itself emphasised a sense of shared ownership in the poems. They were often spread by word of mouth as much as by pamphlet or broadside, tipping them into the common psyche in the same way that common prayers and anthems are, and thence entering into a kind of proletarian folkloric cannon. This act of committal to folk memory has, however, been historically obscured by the self-appointed keepers of British literary ‘polite society’; the plenipotentiary of poetic posterity.

This anonymity of authorship not only emphasised a sense of common ownership of poetry and literature, it also hinted at a contempt for notions of property, especially that of creative expression, and, just as impressively, an indifference towards posterity. Indeed, as the fittingly anonymous Introduction to The Common Muse – Popular British ballad poetry from the 15th to the 20th century puts it (my bold italics):

'The ballad-monger was mobile and difficult to regulate; the ballad poet (often the same person) was usually anonymous. Hence, he was not overawed by Authority – legal, clerical or critical – or by Posterity. Though the limitations of his outlook bound him to his own time and place, he was in all other ways free…'

In every sense then, this proletarian poetry by and on behalf of the un-propertied was symbiotically anti-property. And no doubt one of the reasons for the anonymity of polemical poems and broadside ballads of the past was in order to keep the authors safe from any repercussions due to possible inflammatory or seditious messages in their verses. In this sense such widely distributed polemical poems served as anonymous versified Round Robins.

Building Jerusalem

But the signature of a name to a poem hasn’t always carried with it all the rights-asserting implications and trappings of proprietorship. Why is it that so many English poets and readers feel somehow that Blake belongs to them? It’s because of Blake’s implicit humanity, humility, compassion and universalism of sentiment implicates all of us who are exposed to his work. We become a part of it, and so Blake’s works become a part of us, part of our ‘Englishness’ if you like, but a very radical, half-buried timbre of Englishness.

It’s not just the sentiments but also the anthemic, hymnal quality of ‘Jerusalem’ which binds its readers and singers together in poetic fellowship, in much the same way as a common hymn by sundry ‘Anon’ hymnodists. Hence Blake, his work and his evocative Anglo-Saxon name (meaning, depending on the root, ‘pale/fair’ or, alternately, ‘dark’), which becomes a kind of adjective descriptive of his special type of poetics, of his aphorismic ‘Songs’, enter into the folkloric fabric, become part of our cultural character. Blake belongs to the English, just as Burns belongs to the Scots, Yeats to the Irish, and Dylan Thomas to the Welsh, though all of those poets also have an international reach and building Jerusalem these days is a poetic and political project for all of humanity, not just 'in England's green and pleasant land'.

That politics is not only compatible with poetry but actually an integral part of it is a mode of thought institutionally shunned today by much of the poetry establishment. Yet it was once a commonly held view. Throughout the centuries poetry has demonstrated abundantly in many ways that poetry and politics are interrelated, even if that interrelatedness is often a thorny one. In the past, poetry, or poetic language, was often employed by orators and politicians to reinforce their arguments and ideas, and to such a degree that much historical oratory is often a form of public or declamatory poetry, sometimes rich in aphorism and apothegm.

One only has to think of such eloquent and poetic statesmen as Solon (lawgiver and poet of Ancient Athens), Demosthenes, Pericles, Cicero, Seneca, Thomas More, Oliver Cromwell, Walpole, Napoleon Bonaparte, Benjamin Disraeli, Lloyd George, Keir Hardie, Churchill, Roosevelt, Martin Luther King et al. Or political pamphleteers and ideologues such as John Lilburne, Gerrard Winstanley, Robert Owen, William Morris, Bertrand Russell, Max Weber, even Karl Marx. Das Kapital, let us remember, was lauded by Edmund Wilson, in To The Finland Station, as every bit as poetical as it was polemical.

Oratory, an art form in its own right, has always shared much in common with poetry, and in many respects is the poetry of administration. The roots of much oratory are in Rhetoric, itself rooted in philosophy, and the language of much philosophy is deeply poetic and aphorismic – think Kierkegaard and Nietzsche – as is religious writing. These interrelations are explored in depth in a compendious essay by Nigel Smith, ‘The English Revolution and the End of Rhetoric: John Toland’s Clito (1700) and the Republican Daemon’, in Poetry and Politics.

The common music of poetry

Frequently, use of the term ‘politics’ or ‘political’ in terms of poetry is inextricably linked with socialist or communist thought. Much of the focus of the series of articles will be on neglected or forgotten poets of the British proletariat and artisan classes, as well as those whom Marx called the lumpenproletariat (e.g. street sellers, the unemployed, travellers, tramps etc.). Thus the ‘politics’ of such poetics, almost entirely informed by empirical privation and dissatisfaction with established social hierarchies, is invariably radical, anarchic, militant, revolutionary. The articles will attempt to trace much of this neglected genealogy of English proletarian poetry, as well as that of political poetry in general, across the social classes, and across approximately four centuries, since the inception of the mass printing press.

It is sadly true that much ‘political’ or ‘radical’ poetry, especially that written by those on the margins of society, by those from less privileged backgrounds, the unemployed or precariously employed, and those who are marginalised due to mental health issues, is poorly represented by the poetry publishing world, in spite of spin to the contrary, and overtures to synthetic inclusiveness and box-ticking on the part of ostensibly ‘liberal’ literary ‘elites’.

Andy Croft’s own imprint, Smokestack Books, remains perhaps the foremost champion of left-wing political poetry in the UK. Its mission statement expresses this explicitly and in keeping with the ethical communism of its founding editor:

'Smokestack aims to keep open a space for what is left of the English radical poetic tradition in the twenty-first century. Smokestack champions poets who are unfashionable, radical, left-field and working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority. Smokestack is committed to the common music of poetry; is interested in the World as well as the Word; believes that poetry is a part of and not apart from society; argues that if poetry does not belong to everyone it is not poetry.'

In the poetry journal scene, a thin red line of journals keep up this tradition on the fringes: The Penniless Press and Red Poets, as well as Mike Quille’s ‘Soul Food’ columns in the Communist Review, and Jody Porter's ‘Well Versed’ columns in the Morning Star. There are also some other poetry imprints with similar politics to Smokestack, such as Flambard, Red Squirrel, Shoestring and Waterloo Press. Significantly none of those imprints could be classed as ‘mainstream’ or among the ‘top’ metropolitan imprints. Lastly, webzines such as The International Times, Occupy Poetry, Proletarian Poetry and this writer’s own The Recusant and Militant Thistles help to keep the ‘radical poetic tradition’ represented online.

The phrase ‘common music’ is emphatic of universality and inclusiveness, although unlike music, poetry is inhibited in its reach by the frontiers of different languages, the ‘passports’ of translations often furnishing at best adumbrations of the source texts.

And that final clause of Smokestack's mission statement, ‘if poetry does not belong to everyone it is not poetry’, cleverly inverts the notion of ‘poetry as private property’ by arguing that any poetry that is the private property of the poet is therefore not the property of anyone else and thus is socially and culturally redundant. It confiscates itself from the common consciousness. In contrast, it is precisely the ‘English radical poetic tradition’ mentioned by the mission statement which my forthcoming series will seek to map out, in the hope that those who read it will be encouraged to seek out the neglected works of so many lesser known poets of our cultural past.

News

For stay-at-home writers, poets and artists, we have no less than three callouts running at the moment. 1. The Bread and Roses Poetry Award 2020, supported by Unite (see Poetry section). 2. Working People's Stories in Contemporary Ireland, supported by Irish trade unions (follow-up to Children of the Nation, see Fiction section) and 3. A Culture Matters/Riptide anthology on the climate crisis and capitalism (see Poetry section). Winners of the Bread and Roses Songwriting and Spoken Word Award, sponsored by the CWU and the Musicians' Union, can be heard in the Music section.

Arts hub

Today the young people are marching in the streets by Fred Voss, with image by Martin Gollan The young are marchingyoung as the Golden Rulethe first human eye turned toward the heavens in wonderyoung as a raindropa hammer blow cracking the BastilleBlakeseeing his first angela knee is on our neckbut…

Nicholas Baldion discusses art, portraiture and the Covid-19 crisis, illustrated by some of his portraits of NHS workers. The painting above is of Karl, who works for the NHS in Oxford, and it's by Tim Benson In the ancient Roman Republic, there were laws preventing anyone but the patrician class…

I Can’t Breathe by Joan Jobe Smith Voss I can’t breathe.The smoke from the pyre burning me alivebecause my name is Joan in Rouen chokes me.Othello smothers me with a pillow.Bill Sykes bludgeons me with his walkingstick till I fall to the floor, face down in Dickens dust.Jack the Ripper…

Rita di Santo reviews Woody Allen's new film, A Rainy Day in New York, with a good deal of scepticism “Don't you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we're left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes and I live here.”…

Plague Songs - It Cures What Ails Ya! by Martin Rowson One should not mock the chronic sick,And nor should we mock DominicWhose road-based therapies recall,Damascus-bound, those of St PaulWho was, you lot should be reminded,On a road trip when unblinded.Dom need make no apology!It’s not just opthalmologyThat sees Road…

Darkening by Steve Pottinger for george under a darkening skywe sit round a log fireout there cities are burningthe planet is burning and i can’t breathe out there people are dyingin hospitals in care homesalone in bedsits with the kneeof a cop pressed into their neck and i can’t breathe…

breath by Fran Lock, with image by Martin Gollan inside this symmetrical fiction of skins, we do not courtthe carnivore attentions of a cop with eyes like bullicanteglass. we do not wear our reservoirs. we do not bear ourfreight of names upon the face; find a dirty jest of us…

Culture hub

Clara Paillard is the co-president of PCS Culture Group representing 4,000 museums & heritage workers across the UK. In this addition to our joint series with the Morning Star, she reflects on the bleak prospects for the future of the arts and culture after the pandemic, and argues for emergency…

Esther Leslie questions the media messages and slogans around the Covid-19 pandemic, as part of the joint Morning Star and Culture Matters series on Covid-19 and culture A picture flashed through social media channels. A woman, in a Stars and Stripes dress, protesting at Huntington Beach, California, holds up a…

Charlie Clutterbuck continues the joint Culture Matters/Morning Star series on the future of cultural activities after the Covid-19 crisis, looking at what will we have on our plates afterwards. Image above: ultra-processed cheese production, photo by Matthias Kabel Food is essential to live but has also been at the centre…

Stuart Cartland looks at the cultural and political representation of topography, at how landscape becomes mythscape, expressing class power and national identity. The painting is Mr and Mrs. Andrews, by Thomas Gainsborough, about 1750 As the fine weather and easing of coronavirus restrictions are upon us, many will be wanting…

Dennis Broe looks at how our class-divided society is represented in three current series being streamed on TV One of the effects of the coronavirus crisis is the accentuation of already exacerbated class differences. Yes, middle-class digital workers cheered largely working-class first responders from their windows, but that did not…

Sean Ledwith explains how classrooms are now the front line of the coronavirus class war It is difficult to imagine what Downing Street thought would be achieved by sending out Michael Gove recently to assure teachers that schools will be safe environments by June 1st. No person is more guaranteed…

James Crossley reflects on the dangers and possibilities of the Covid-19 crisis. Image: Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Albrecht Durer, 1497-8 Towards the end of March, it was reported that an English hiker returned from a five-day trek in the New Zealand wilds and was surprised to see “three hooded…

Yanis Iqbal presents the second part of his critique of educational culture under neoliberal capitalism by outlining a new educational strategy To mount an effective counteroffensive against neoliberal educational culture, we need a new strategy which will generate critically conscious subjects who would cooperate to construct the cultural structure of…

The arts are just a part of the weapons of life. Art can make us see and feel reality and help change that reality. Art is revelation. Art is hard work. Art is part of protest.

Jayne Cortez

Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.

Bertolt Brecht

The most precious thing in the sharp ebb and flow of the revolutionary waves is the proletariat's spiritual growth.

Rosa Luxemburg
Letters from Prison

The individual will reach full realization as a human creature, once the chains of alienation are broken. This will be translated concretely into the reconquering of one's true nature through liberated labor, and the expression of one's own human condition through culture and art,